2/16/2010 @ 6:00PM

Podium Dreams

Athletes competing in the Vancouver Olympics are not the only people hoping to ascend a podium this winter. Hard times traditionally see a surge of interest in public speaking, as unemployed marketers and managers look for ways to boost their incomes by leveraging their expertise. An entire industry exists to groom them for stardom–for a price.

“In recessionary times, when there are big layoffs, we see a greater influx of people saying, ‘Hey, I want to try this speaking thing,’ ” says Stacy Tetschner, executive vice president of the Phoenix-based National Speakers Association.

That may seem counterintuitive, given that many businesses have slashed their travel budgets. Fewer conferences means fewer jobs for speakers. Tetschner’s group currently numbers about 3,300 dues-paying professionals, down from almost 4,000 before the recession took hold. Yet at the same time, the group’s Academy program has seen an increase in inquiries from neophytes who are willing to pony up a $175 initiation fee and $49 a month to learn the secrets of the trade.

Speaker training has been around ever since some ancient Athenian advised Demosthenes to practice speaking with pebbles in his mouth to improve his elocution. But the modern speaker industry only took shape in recent decades, spurred by the huge growth in business travel. Even during hard times, thousands of meetings and conferences are held each year, which creates a voracious market for speakers.

“Corporations and associations pay big bucks to hear about your business and life experiences,” asserts professional speaker Tom Antion on his Web site Antion.com. “It’s relatively easy to pull in $100,000-plus a year in the speaking business working from home (if you know exactly what to do and how to do it).”

And how do you acquire this arcane knowledge? From Antion himself, of course. For a mere $1,597 (less various discounts), he will send you his “Wake ‘Em Up DVD Video Professional Speaking System.”

Alternatively you could hire a speaker coach, pay to attend a seminar or buy a how-to book like Speak and Grow Rich. The Web is chockablock with guidance on the subject of talking your way to the top. But if you take the plunge, you probably won’t make anything like $100,000 per year, especially in the current climate. Instead you’re likely to start out by offering to speak for free at your local Rotary Club. If you click you can gradually move up the food chain from free to fee and eventually sign up with a speakers’ bureau, which will market you to meeting planners.

“A lot of people think that speaking sounds like a really easy way to make some quick money,” Tetschner, of the National Speakers Association, says. “And it’s not.”

The industry is geared toward entrepreneurial types who see public speaking as a way to market themselves and their businesses. Case in point: Maggie Hunts, a onetime corporate sales trainer for
Intel
who later switched her focus to acting and stand-up comedy. Hunts, who is diabetic, published a book in 2007 about living with the disease. Having thus burnished her credentials as an expert on that topic, she signed up with the National Speakers Association’s Academy program, which taught her how to market herself to conferences. Now she’s a certified professional who makes a living giving inspirational and entertaining talks–which in turn drive sales of her book. “The NSA is all about speaking as a business,” Hunts says.

Some people prefer the do-it-yourself approach. “I’ve never paid for a book, seminar or any other program to become a public speaker,” says Jonathan Snook, a Web developer and designer based in Ottawa, Ontario. “I went about it by contacting conference organizers and presenting them with an idea that would appeal to their audience.”

Snook found it slow going at first, to judge by this comment he posted on his blog when he was still new to the game: “The fame. The glory. The joys of galavanting across the planet presenting at conferences around the world. Sounds exciting doesn’t it? Let me tell you, it’s not as easy as it sounds to break into the speaking circuit.”

But he kept at it and has managed to establish himself, not as a full-time speaker but as an occasional presenter at conferences related to his field of expertise. Most recently Snook spoke at “An Event Apart,” a Web design conference held in December in San Francisco, where his topic was “Integrating Javascript Effectively.”

If that rather technical topic strikes you as less than inspiring, perhaps you see yourself more as a motivational speaker, delivering keynote addresses in crowded ballrooms for five-figure fees. Follow that dream and you may end up like the overly optimistic character Greg Kinnear played in the film Little Miss Sunshine: a failed motivational speaker who keeps pitching his nine-step “Refuse to Lose” concept to an indifferent world.

Professional speaking is a potentially useful strategy for personable, well-spoken people who can package themselves as experts on a given topic. But it’s not a path to stardom, at least not for the vast majority of would-be speakers. Those with stardust in their eyes should try their luck in Hollywood instead.